In this book, Ann Laura Stoler navigates the shadows and shatterzones of democratic policies, considering how imperial features are folded through (il)liberal orders, where racial inequities thicken in the borderlands of interior frontiers. Sometimes those frontiers, or the lines that define the contours of belonging and not belonging, are porous--often fixed and firm. For those on the "wrong side" of the fabulated division between inside and out, entry requirements can be opaque, neither verbal nor visible. Illegibilities are secured in code.
The sites of inequity are disparate, the sensibilities that produce and sustain those inequities are as well. Borrowing Ralph Ellison's phrase, Stoler exposes unexpected sites and scenes that register the "lower frequencies" of denigration. Seemingly benign sites are laid bare as toxic, as in her essay eviscerating the warped criteria assigned to taste and who can have it, and in her study of the seared lives that longing, envy, and humiliation inscribe. In so doing, she hews close to the "soft" violences of sentiments that ascribe, distribute, and assess human kinds.
But the project of these essays turns as much to those who reject those violences, who distil refusal in "poetic rage"--the phrase Stoler invokes to describe the anti-colonial avant-garde. Stoler casts this aesthetic of dissent through a surge of multi-media archiving ventures among Palestinians bent on creating and conjuring landscapes beyond Israeli violences-for the future and today.
Stoler hugs close to the dark corridors where racial inequalities thrive. These inequities may be blatant but "unnoticed," others are neither muted nor unseen. Each essay iterates a "(sub)metric of inequality" as a fictive measure of human worth. With an optic, ever bold and subtle, she turns the reader to the social ecologies and racial logics targeting the body and the senses. These are hazardous zones for the instruments and infrastructures in which (il)liberalisms invest. Increasingly unsettled and challenged by a more radically just demos, these sites of contest may be the emergent political scenes of racial sovereignty's unmaking and where the weapons of that unmaking are readied, and stored.
In this collection of essays, Ann Laura Stoler takes aim at the racial formations of imperial democracy and its interior frontiers, helping us dissect the racist underpinnings of current forms of global violence. Building on Etienne Balibar's political conceptualization of the "interior frontier," Stoler argues that interior frontiers are sites of struggle between different populations, spaces, and persons--divisions that can be silently and violently enforced. Insightful and provocative, Interior Frontiers looks at the legacy of colonialism and the contemporary conditions of imperial democracy.
What do we need in a moment of catastrophe: environmental, sanitary, cultural, democratic, pedagogic? Not pain relievers, but rage. But not only rage, also infinite subtlety and sensitivity. But not only sensitivity, also erudition, memory, inflexible conceptual rigor. All this, and more, we find in Stoler's collection of essays, which weaves together the sinews, elusive inequalities, and creative refusals of imperial democracy. I call this a book of necessity.
